There is a new salon game on Wall Street: Councils of the next owner of Tiktok.
President Trump signed an executive order in January that delayed the enforcement of a law that forbade the popular video app. According to the order, the app must now be sold to a non-Chinese owner at the beginning of April.
Since he signed the order, Mr. Trump drops a flurry of sometimes conflicting hints about how to take place in the coming weeks: he has suggested that he wants a bidding war; He said that the United States must have part of the app; He has mentioned Microsoft and Elon Musk as potential buyers, even when others have lifted their hands.
But the mechanics of a potential sale is still cloudy.
Bytedance, the owner of Tiktok, has said for years that it cannot sell the app, partly because the Chinese government would not allow the export of its important algorithm.
And it is also not clear that the American investors of Tiktok are also interested in a sale.
“There are a number of alternatives that we can talk to President Trump and his team do not sell enough about it from the company with which the company can continue to operate, perhaps with a change in control of a kind but not having to sell,” Bill Ford , Chief Executive of General Atlantic, CNBC said. General Atlantic, a private equity company, is an investor in Bytedance.
Here is what we know about what happens next:
Who wants to buy tick?
Mr. Trump recently driven a number of names in public, including Mr. Musk, Microsoft and Oracle. In 2020, Microsoft, Oracle and Walmart Tiktok tried before those conversations fell apart.
Other potential bidders are Jesse Tinsley, the founder of the payroll administration company Employer.com, who has compiled a consortium that includes the Chief Executive of Roblox, the video game platform.
The “Shark Tank” star Kevin O'Leary is part of a bid from the billionaire Frank McCourt, who tried to buy Tiktok Tiktok without the coveted algorithm. The valuation of his $ 20 billion bankers is considered much lower than what Tiktok could achieve with his recommendation technology.
The YouTube star Mr. Beast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has also been in conversation with “different potential bidders” to be a strategic partner in a takeover, according to Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesperson. (His role would not be to finance a purchase, as some reports have speculated.)
Mr. Musk of course bought Twitter, now called X, in 2022. And the Chinese government is perhaps more willing to sell to him, given the large things that Tesla does in China. But the billionaire has not noticed whether he wants to buy Tiktok.
Microsoft refused to comment. Oracle and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Tiktok and Bytedance did not comment on whether they are involved in sales conversations.
Who will lead to negotiations for a deal and why?
Mr. Trump keeps the court on the hands, and it is unlikely that everyone Try to close a deal without a fair degree of trust that he would support a transaction. Mr. Ford of General Atlantic said in Davos that he would negotiate with Mr Trump and Minister of Finance Scott Bessent, who leads the Interagency panel that deals for concerns about national security.
Mr. Ford said that Mr Bessent and the board of Bytedance would be part of the conversations and described his company as 'ready to deal with'.
It will also be important for dealmakers to be confident that they have support from the Chinese government. China has resisted Tiktok. It has updated its export control rules in 2020, so that it can block the export of the algorithm that is crucial to allow Tiktok to work. Although some potential buyers, such as Mr. McCourt, have said they want to buy Tiktok without the algorithm, they would buy a considerably reduced product.
What did Trump say about what he wants?
Every deal will approve Mr. Need Trump and he said he would like to do one. He said reporters last month that there had been “a lot of interest” in Tiktok.
He has outlined the contours of the kind of deal he wants to hit: “What I think of saying someone is buying and giving half to the United States of America,” he said.
On Monday, Mr Trump also signed an executive order that was aimed at setting up an American sovereign wealth fund and suggested that the fund could be a potential investor in the Deal with Tiktok.
However, it is unclear whether such a structure would solve the national security problems that caused the congress to adopt the law, including the fear that bytedance could hand over sensitive Tiktok user data to the Chinese government, or that Beijing could use the app to to spread to spread to spread for spreading propaganda. It is also unclear in which form the United States can become an investor.
The law makes it illegal for companies to update or distribute Tiktok in the United States, unless there is a “qualified disinvestment” of the app of Bytedance. It specifically says that Tiktok cannot maintain an operational relationship with a Chinese or Chinese -controlled company.
What have investors said?
The law says that Tiktok can no longer be checked by a Chinese company or can rely on a Chinese company for its recommendation algorithm or for sharing data.
But as the comments of Mr. Ford of General Atlantic indicate, investors investigators investigate that would circumvent an outright sale. A deal that is forced by political pressure would most likely require that they are taking a steep cut on the value of their investments, analysts say.
But it is not clear that the other options, including attracting new investors or that American investors would exchange their investment in Bytedance for an interest in US Tiktok, would tackle the national security problems identified by the law. The law prohibits a person or people in China to keep more than 20 percent of Tiktok, directly or indirectly.
What can a sale stand in the way?
There is a crucial question that even called Tiktok for the court applications: Can the American activities of Tiktok work if it is cut off from his global infrastructure? Tiktok said that such a sale was not 'commercial, technological or legally feasible'. That is partly because China probably cannot allow every American buyer to take over the algorithm from Tiktok. It is also because much of the technological infrastructure of Tiktok is housed outside the United States.
The question is also whether Tiktok will remain just as desirable as in 2020. Large technology companies such as Microsoft, who wanted to buy Tiktok in 2020, have since dedicated to publishing billions on the race for artificial intelligence. According to analysts, a Tiktok acquisition would be an important change of strategy.
Buy a Social Media Company is often a difficult proposition, given how quickly it can get out of favor. Snap, once extremely popular among teenagers, now acts below the price for which it was sold in its first public offer in 2017 – an example of how drastic teenagers and investors can change.
Buying Tiktok would also be expensive, making it a purchase that could only make a handful of companies themselves. And those who are large enough to do this, such as Google and Meta, would probably be confronted with antitrust research if she bought the app.
Will Tiktok be the same as it sells?
We don't know. A sale can solve the legal problems of Tiktok, but it can also change the app that users know today.
Some Tiktok users have suggested in the past that Tiktok, in the same way that X has transformed under the ownership of Mr. Musk, can change under a new leader. In the case of X, many users and advertisers fled the app.
